Through the rift, then, and into Dunstan's Region the Dauntless bored at the unimaginable pace of her terrific full–blast drive. The tracers' beams grew harder and more taut with every passing hour; the fleeing speedster itself grew large and clear upon the plates. The opalescence of the spiral arm became a firmament of stars. A sun detached itself from that firmament; a dwarf of Type G. Planets appeared.
One of these in particular, the second out, looked so much like Earth that it made some of the observers homesick. There were the familiar polar ice– caps, the atmosphere and stratosphere, the high–piled, billowy masses of clouds. There were vast blue oceans, there were huge, unfamiliar continents glowing with chlorophyllic green.
At the spectroscopes, at the bolometers, at the many other instruments men went rapidly and skillfully to work.
"Hope the ape's heading for Two, and I think he is," Kinnison remarked, as he studied the results. "People living on that planet would be human to ten places, for all the tea in China. No wonder he was so much at home on Tellus… Yup, it's Two—there, he's gone inert."
"Whoever is piloting that can went to school just one day in his life and that day it rained and the teacher didn't come," Henderson snorted. "And he's trying to balance her down on her tail—look at her bounce and flop around! He's just begging for a crack–up."
"If he makes it it'll be bad—plenty bad," Kinnison mused. "He'll gain a lot of time on us while we're rounding the globe on our landing spiral."
"Why spiral, Kim? Why not follow him down, huh? Our intrinsic is no worse than his—it's the same one, in fact." "Get conscious, Hen. This is a superbattlewagon—just in case you didn't know it before."
"So what? I can certainly handle this super a damn sight better than that groundgripper is handling that scrap–heap down there." Henry Henderson, Master Pilot Number One of the Service, was not bragging. He was merely voicing what to him was the simple and obvious truth.
"Mass is what. Mass and volume and velocity and inertia and power. You never stunted this much mass before, did you?"
"No, but what of it? I took a course in piloting once, in my youth." He was then a grand old man of twenty–eight or thereabouts. "I can line up the main rear center pipe onto any grain of sand you want to pick out on that field, and hold her there until she slags it down."
"If you think you can spell 'able', hop to it!"
"QX, this is going to be fun." Henderson gleefully accepted the challenge, then clicked on his general–alarm microphone. "Strap down, everybody, for inert maneuvering, Class Three, on the tail. Tail over to belly landing. Hipe!"
The Bergenholms were cut and as the tremendously massive superdreadnought, inert, shot off at an angle under its Tellurian intrinsic velocity, Master Pilot Number One proved his rating. As much a virtuoso of the banks and tiers of blast keys and levers before him as a concert organist is of his instrument, his hands and feet flashed hither and yon. Not music?—the bellowing, crescendo thunders of those jets were music to the hard–boiled space–hounds who heard them. And in response to the exact placement and the precisely–measured power of those blasts the great sky–rover spun, twisted, and bucked as her prodigious mass was forced into motionlessness relative to the terrain beneath her.
Three G's, Kinnison reflected, while this was going on. Not bad—he'd guessed it at four or better. He could sit up and take notice at three, and he did so.
This world wasn't very densely populated, apparently. Quite a few cities, but all just about on the equator. Nothing in the temperate zones at all; even the highest power revealed no handiwork of man. Virgin forest, untouched prairie. Lots of roads and things in the torrid zone, but nothing anywhere else. The speedster was making a rough and unskillful, but not catastrophic landing.
The field which was their destination lay just outside a large city. Funny—it wasn't a space–field at all. No docks, no pits, no ships. Low, flat buildings—hangars. An airfield, then, although not like any air– field he knew. Too small. Gyros? 'Copters? Didn't see any—all little ships. Crates—biplanes and tripes. Made of wire and fabric. Wotta woil, wotta woil!
The Dauntless landed, fairly close to the now deserted speedster. "Hold everything, men," Kinnison cautioned. "Something funny here. I'll do a bit of looking around before we open up."
He was not surprised that the people in and around the airport were human to at least ten places of classification; he had expected that from the planetary data. Nor was he surprised at the fact that they wore no clothing. He had learned long since that, while most human or near–human races—particularly the women—wore at least a few ornaments, the wearing of clothing as such, except when it was actually needed for protection, was far more the exception than the rule. And, just as a Martian, out of deference to conventions, wears a light robe upon Tellus, Kinnison as a matter of course stripped to his evenly–tanned hide when visiting planets upon which nakedness was de rigueur. He had attended more than one state function, without a quibble or a qualm, tastefully attired in his Lens.
No, the startling fact was that there was not a man in sight anywhere around the place; there was nothing male perceptible as far as his sense of perception could reach. Women were laboring, women were supervising, women were running the machines. Women were operating the airplanes and servicing them. Women were in the offices. Women and girls and little girls and girl babies filled the waiting rooms and the automobile–like conveyances parked near the airport and running along the streets.
And, even before Kinnison had finished uttering his warning, while his hand was in the air reaching for a spy–ray switch, he felt an alien force attempting to insinuate itself into his mind.
Fat chance! With any ordinary mind it would have succeeded, but in the case of the Gray Lensman it was just like trying to stick a pin unobtrusively into a panther. He put up a solid block automatically, instantaneously; then, a fraction of a second later, a thought–tight screen enveloped the whole vessel.
"Did any of you1 fellows…" he began, then broke off. They wouldn't have felt it, of course; their brains could have been read completely with them none the wiser. He was the only Lensman aboard, and even most Lensmen couldn't…this was his oyster. But that kind of stuff, on such an apparently backward planet as this? It didn't make sense, unless that zwilnik…ah, this was his oyster, absolutely!
"Something funnier even than I thought—thought–waves," he calmly continued his original remark. "Thought I'd better undress to go out there, but I'm not going to. I'd wear full armor, except that I may need my hands or have to move fast. If they get insulted at my clothes I'll apologize later."
"But listen, Kim, you can't go out there alone—especially without armor!"
"Sure I can. I'm not taking any chances. You fellows couldn't do me much good out there, but you can here. Break out a 'copter and keep a spy–ray on me. If I give you the signal, go to work with a couple of narrow needle–beams. Pretty sure that I won't need any help, but you can't always tell."
The airlock opened and Kinnison stepped out. He had a high–powered thoughtscreen, but he did not need it—yet. He had his DeLameters. He had also a weapon deadlier by far even than those mighty portables; a weapon so utterly deadly that he had not used it. He did not need to test it—since Worsel had said that it would work, it would. The trouble with it was that it could not merely disable: if used at all it killed, with complete and grim finality. And behind him he had the full awful power of the Dauntless. He had nothing to worry about.